22The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. 22 aSol LeWitt. Dean De Cockers latest presentation at the Visual Arts Center in the small Central California town of Visalia brings that maxim into sharp relief, gathering sculptures and works on paper that shuttle between abstraction and conceptual representation. Dean De Cocker: Cyphers and Codes in the Coral Sea closed August 1, 2026 at the Visual Arts Center, Visalia, California.
Machines, memory, and form
De Cocker has long been drawn to machinesafrom bicycles to motorcycles, cars to airplanesaand the formal echoes of those devices animate this body of work. His balsa structure 8 a.m., The Beginning (19872024) recalls the wings of his childhood airplane models. Precisely built, it not only references wooden models, but also the interior structures inside actual metallic wings, underscoring the artists sustained engagement with engineering as a source for abstract form.
In Welcome to the Pacific (2012), the artist looks to propellers, specifically those from the fighter planes American pilots flew over the Pacific Ocean during World War II. Four elegant ovoids meet to create two bowed shapes that are attached to an orange openwork platform. Constructed of wood and painted in beige and brown stripes, their curvilinear formats and surfaces recall the work of Minimalist painter Frank Stella.
Beige-and-brown stripes recur in Running at Full Tilt (2012), a fiberglass and wood sculpture suspended from a black metallic armature. The crenelated fiberglass element evokes architectural outlines, while its curving tops look back to the airplane wings that seed De Cockers vocabulary. Similar crenelated silhouettes appear in the earlier Currents and Winds (2002), where five smaller striped components are suspended on the wall like scattered puzzle pieces. Covered in canvas, they evoke the kind of upholstery that covers the seats of cars and other vehicle interiors.
Codes, battleships, and abstraction
Beyond sculpture, De Cocker produces ink drawings on vellum and digital prints on plexiglass. Prints in his 2024 series are named after US battleships sunk during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Oklahoma (BB-37) honors the Nevada-class battleship capsized by torpedoes, its wreckage never found. Black and white ribbon-like strips cluster over a black and white ground, edged by a thin chartreuse-green line that reads like hems; the chartreuse is only visible up close, yet it highlights the forms even from a distance. Although the work represents a concrete object, it eschews mimesis, abstracting an immense form into small geometric elements.
The exhibition title, Cyphers and Codes in the Coral Sea, referred to encrypted military messages as well as the 1942 battle between US and Japanese forces in the Pacific Theater of the Second World War. Across media, the displayed artworks take historic objects and conceptually translate them into formal compositions in both two and three dimensions. Drawing on airplane wings and propellers alongside automobile and architectural details, De Cocker has forged a recognizable vocabulary whose oscillation between abstraction and representation sustains its visual pull.
Vía artandcakela.com
